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Talk:Green Lantern Recommended Reading
Expansion? Based on a discussion over on Template talk:Green Lantern RR, I'd like to take a crack at reworking this page a little. Less of an edit, though, and more of an expansion: this is a decent enough list for modern GL stories, but it's heavily biased towards the mid-2000s onward, and, save for a brief mention of the Silver Age in the introduction, basically ignores anything prior to the early 1990s. The problem is that I'm not sure what format/affect we're going for with this article. Ideally, I'd like to have a page that functions as a sort of general landing page for the whole Green Lantern mythos, that would touch upon the entire history of the franchise, and hopefully includes some sort of organized/contextualized link to most, if not all, titles published as part of it. As it is now, I really can't find anything even close to that here, and it strikes me as deeply weird that Wikipedia has a more comprehensive (and certainly much easier to follow) overview of the history of Green Lantern than the DC Database does. I really do feel that that would be valuable resource... but I'm not sure this is the appropriate place for it. The general gist I get, from both this and other RR pages, is of a selective, carefully curated sampling rather than anything comprehensive. And I think that sort of thing is important, too. I certainly don't want to overwrite or drown this out. So I'm hoping to feel out the best approach. Am I barking up the wrong tree entirely? Is there a better place this? Would be useful for me to work up some sort of sandbox demo of what I'm thinking? Thoughts, anyone? —Seancdaug (talk) 21:41, April 11, 2019 (UTC) :I started the Recommended Reading pages and wrote most of them including this one. They're not intended as a directory of every Green Lantern comic ever published... we have a section for that, it's the Comics section on the Green Lantern disambig. The RR page is specifically intended to help new readers find a good entry point into Green Lantern and then navigate to further stories. It's one of the few page categories on this site that's subjective by nature, which can be annoying, but I know it's very helpful for some people. It's more like a Staff Picks. It doesn't have a lot of pre-1990's stuff because, while I do believe in the value of those older stories, 99 times out of 100 if you tried to introduce someone to GL today with the comics from the 1960's they would probably not be interested. I do agree with you that this page could use a lot of fleshing out, but I think you're describing content that would be most appropriate on Green Lantern Publication History. - Billy Arrowsmith (Talk), 23:14, April 11, 2019 (UTC) ::Yeah, that was pretty much the impression I got from reading this page (so, y'know, good work!). But that still leaves us with the question of where to put an actual outline of the franchise. The disambig page doesn't work because it's specifically for books that are simply titled "Green Lantern" (or close enough to it, anyway, like "The Green Lantern"). Links to related/spin-off titles like All-American Comics, Green Lantern Corps, Mosaic, Emerald Warriors, New Guardians, Hal and Pals, and Green Lanterns don't seem to fit. And while some of those have their own dedicated disambig page, many others don't and, as such, are needlessly difficult to find. ::That's what I was trying to get at by mentioning the Wikipedia article on Green Lantern. That page is significantly more useful for the uninitiated because there's an actual logical flow between different bits of information. It covers the full publication history, the various spin-off titles, and is all structured in a straightforward fashion. It doesn't have the kind of detail you can find here, to be sure, but so much of what we have here is damnably difficult to actually *find*, or poorly contextualized if it's not. The Publication History page is only linked in smallish font on the overly large navbox, for example. And I was directed here as a better alternative for listing lesser known titles than the Green Lantern RR template, which at least suggests that the purpose of this page (as valuable as it is, please don't get me wrong!) isn't as clear as it should be, either. There's no... superstructure, for lack of a better word. ::I'm not saying that we should be prioritizing sixty-year books as much as modern stuff, by any means! I think the rationale for what is and isn't covered here is absolutely solid. My real concern is that there's nothing connecting the various bits and pieces of GL (or any other property's) content together. Sure, chances are that most readers are going to come here looking for recent material. But that doesn't (and shouldn't) come at the expense of people who want to do a deeper dive into the material and are basically left flailing around categories, infoboxes, and lists without any contextual information trying to make heads or tails out of everything. I'm not saying that this should be the place for it, but it should be somewhere, and it should preferably be discoverable without having to know what you're looking for in advance. —Seancdaug (talk) 01:31, April 12, 2019 (UTC) :::I think creating a sandbox page might be a good immediate solution. You can work on the page now and we can see where it fits later on. Kyletheobald (talk) 03:20, April 13, 2019 (UTC) ::::All right, sounds good. I'm going to work on expanding the publication history page first, but when that's done, I'll cobble together something to show off what I'm thinking. —Seancdaug (talk) 15:23, April 15, 2019 (UTC)